Professor co-authors World Economic Forum report

22nd January 2015

The World Economic Forum has just released a report on entrepreneurship co-authored by Mark Hart, Professor in the Aston Centre for Growth (Aston Business School).

The report, entitled "Leveraging Entrepreneurial Ambition and Innovation: A Global Perspective on Entrepreneurship, Competitiveness and Development" was produced jointly by a Global Entrepreneurship Monitor team of professors from, Aston Business School, Strathclyde, Universidad del Desarrollo, Chile and Babson College, US. The universities worked with a senior team from the Investor Industries group at the World Economic Forum and Endeavor, the organisation that promotes high-impact entrepreneurship in emerging markets around the world.

The report shows that early-stage entrepreneurial activity is higher in economies that are less competitive and lower in highly competitive economies. Conversely, the proportion of ambitious and innovative entrepreneurs is more frequently high in more competitive economies.

In many highly competitive economies with low rates of business starts, entrepreneurial drive manifests itself through more formalised structures – in what the report calls “entrepreneurial employee activity”. The report suggests that this should caution anyone from jumping to quick conclusions about the quality of entrepreneurial ecosystems based on entrepreneurship rates alone.

Professor Hart, who is a co-director of GEM UK, commented: "This is the first time that Global Entrepreneurship Monitor and the World Economic Forum have collaborated on a research report. Coming on top of recent "Missing Entrepreneurs" annual reviews and Policy Briefs from the OECD and the European Commission, which drew heavily on GEM data, this demonstrates the traction that GEM is now getting as a authoritative source of information on entrepreneurship around the world."

The WEF report can be downloaded here and the OECD/European Commission reports are available free here.